12th September 2001 Archive

Australian telecoms watchdog the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has released a competition notice against the incumbent telco Telstra, accusing it of anti-competitive activities with the roll-out of ADSL Internet connections.

17.40 GMT: It would appear the immediate threat from more terrorist threats is over, although the States has gone into a state of panic. Hundreds of buildings across the US, viewed as possible targets, have been evacuated. All airports have been shut down. Borders shut. The flood of calls into New York has jammed switchboards. Companies are setting staff home early.

You'll pardon me if I don't want to send you another of my usual articles about Linux or Open Source. I'd rather not write about the alleged evils of Microsoft. I don't want to complain about the misappropriation of public intellectual property by private interests and their lawyers. That stuff seems entirely out of place today.

A visiting tech CEO broke the news to us at 7am Pacific Time. He was at San Francisco Airport, and had just learned that all outbound flights had been cancelled. He wanted our advice on how to best get to Los Angeles quickly for two days of business meetings he had planned.

Lower Manhattan is shrouded in soot and covered in ash and debris. What appears to be an uncontrolled gas fire at the site of the World Trade Center collapse is compounding the tragedy, making it extremely difficult for emergency service and rescue workers to reach injured survivors in the immediate area.

Email has puts thousands of relatives and friends of New York residents at ease in the last day. Phone networks have buckled under the weight of demand and through damage from the terrorist attacks, leaving thousands concerned for people's welfare.

It's a sad fact but whenever anything terrible happens, usually involving death, there will always be some that react bizarrely, go off on weird tangents or use the collective sorrow to draw attention to themselves. The terrorist attacks yesterday have focussed huge numbers of people on one subject as rarely before in modern history.

Microsoft's Xbox successor, tentatively dubbed the HomeStation, will indeed be based on Nvidia' nForce chipset and Intel's Pentium 4 processor, a source familiar with the machine's development have told The Register.

Our homes are gradually filling up with a multitude of entertainment systems and computer devices. While this is welcome, the cables they require are not. Getting devices to communicate without cumbersome cabling not only eases installation it also makes for a tidier house. Trust's wireless kit is designed for precisely this purpose.

Troubled American publisher Interplay has announced a "change of board composition" and future restructuring plans, with confirmation that French company Titus (which now owns 51 per cent of Interplay's stock) has nominated "a slate of individuals for election as directors at Interplay's annual meeting of stockholders".

The first inevitable news reports linking the terrorist attacks to computer games have emerged, with Britain's Sky News suggesting earlier this afternoon that the terrorists could have used software such as Microsoft's Flight Simulator games to practice flying to other cities and crashing their planes into buildings. Despite mounting evidence that at least some of the hijackers were trained pilots, the report was posted on the http://www.sky.com/skynews/storytemplate/storytoppic/0,,30000-1029258,00.html" target="_blank">Sky News site on Thursday morning, complete with a tasteless screenshot of Flight Simulator showing the cockpit of a jet flying straight towards the World Trade Center. The story claims that "the terrorists who flew passenger planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon could have used a £45 computer game to help them train", adding that the game "even allows players to simulate crashing into buildings". Needless to say this is pure speculation, and we are disappointed to see certain sensationalist elements of the mainstream media once again linking video games to a terrible tragedy. ®

A Cisco Systems representative has apologised for an ill-considered email sent out today that suggested the terrorist-created chaos in the US was a "good opportunity" for UK resellers to sell kit here.